The Source of Sexual, et al, Perversion

from Lacan On-Line

Our desires are not our own, they are the Other’s
There are two relatively straightforward ways in which we can understand one of Lacan’s most well-known maxims, that “Man’s desire is the desire of the Other”? (Seminar XI, p.235). Firstly, that desire is essentially a desire for recognition from this ‘Other’; secondly that desire is for the thing that we suppose the Other desires, which is to say, the thing that the Other lacks.

In commenting on the way that desire repeats and insists through the transference and the signifier in psychoanalytic work, Lacan verifies our first reading, that desire is fundamentally a desire for recognition:

“The necessary and sufficient reason for the repetitive insistence of these desires in the transference and their permanent remembrance in a signifier that repression has appropriated – that is, in which the repressed returns – is found if one accepts the idea that in these determinations the desire for recognition dominates the desire that is to be recognised, preserving it as such until it is recognised” (Ecrits, 431).

In other words, desire pushes for recognition. It is less a question of what we desire as much as it is that we be recognised. Moreover, Lacan believes that this dependence on the other for recognition is responsible for structuring not only our desires, but even our drives:

“To return psychoanalysis to a veridical path, it is worth recalling that analysis managed to go so far in the revelation of man’s desires only by following, in the veins of neurosis and the marginal subjectivity of the individual, the structure proper to a desire that thus proves to model it at an unexpected depth – namely, the desire to have his desire recognised. This desire, in which it is literally verified that man’s desire is alienated in the other’s desire, in effect structures the drives discovered in analysis, in accordance with all the vicissitudes of the logical substitutions in their source, aim, and object” (Ecrits, 343).

So firstly our desire is a desire for recognition. But secondly it is also the desire for what we believe the other desires. We can see this as a consequence of the desire for recognition: what we experience as our own desire is always going to be, in a certain sense, the other’s desire, the other that we desire recognition from.

We can understand this ‘other’ in two ways: first, as indicated with a lower case o, the other person, our counterpart, our semblable; second, as the Other with a capital O, a more ‘otherly’ other, the essential feature of which being that although we never know quite what their desire is, we are on a constant quest to find an answer. This big Other might be another person in their essentially enigmatic dimension; or it might be the assumed virtues, morals and ideals of our culture and upbringing. One of the reasons why it is useful to put the capital O on this maxim of man’s desire being the desire of the Other is that it renders this ‘otherness’ of the Other more stark.

We never fully know exactly what the Other desires or why it desires it, or in what way we ourselves might be implicated. For the subject, desire is thus a constant process of questioning what the Other has or desires to have. In an address to the British Psychoanalytical Society in 1951 Lacan sums this up in saying:

“The object of man’s desire, and we are not the first to say this, is essentially an object desired by someone else. One object can become equivalent to another, owing to the effect producted by this intermediary, in making it possible for objects to be exchanged and compared. This process tends to diminish the special significance of any one particular object, but at the same time it brings into view the existence of objects without number” (Lacan, ‘Some Reflections on the Ego’, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 34, 11-17; reproduced in Furman and Levy (eds), Influential Papers from the 1950s, Karnac, 2003, p.295 – 296).

Equally, in the late sixties Lacan says:

“Desire full stop is always the desire of the Other. Which basically means that we are always asking the Other what he desires” (My Teaching, p.38).

This is the second way to understand the idea of our desire being the desire of the Other: as a desire for what we think the Other desires or lacks. So taking these two readings of Lacan’s maxim together, the lesson Lacan has for us is that the consequence of striving for recognition from the Other is that we can never ‘simply’ desire. Our desire is not something innate inside us. Indeed, for Lacan our desires are not even our own – we always have to desire in the second degree, finding a path to our own desire and our own recognition by asking the question of what the Other desires. We have to desire things that are desirable to the Other – whether other people or the Otherness of our socio-cultural context – and through that process the desire of the Other becomes our own. This is an idea that has its heritage in Hegel’s philsophy, as Lacan acknowledges in the Ecrits:

“Man’s very desire is constituted, he [Hegel] tells us, under the sign of mediation: it is the desire to have one’s desire recognised. Its object is a desire, that of other people, in the sense that man has no object that is constituted for his desire without some mediation. This is clear from his earliest needs, in that, for example, his very food must be prepared; and we find this anew in the whole development of his satisfaction, beginning with the conflict between master and slave, through the entire dialectic of labour” (Ecrits, 182).

To desire is to answer the question ‘What does the Other desire?’

So now we know why "some" girls wear short skirts and makeup. They think they know what men want (they're right, of course), and they want "recognition"... but mostly the latter. Of course, men aren't always the only "Other" that they're trying to keep in mind. ;)